As the Year of Faith begins, Martin Poulsom SDB considers the relation between faith and reason, tracing a development that has taken place in the thinking of the Church since Vatican II. The author is a Salesian of Don Bosco and a lecturer in theology at Heythrop College, University of London.

There is something about the triumph of human reason that makes for a great news story. With the discovery of evidence for the Higgs Boson earlier this year, physics took another step towards a Theory of Every- thing " the exciting possibility of uniting all the existing theories of physics into one simple and elegant account of our universe. Indeed, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking both famously claimed that a Theory of Everything would remove the need for belief in God, because there would be nothing for a Creator to do.1 Similar statements have also been made more recently on the basis of the theory of evolution in biology, perhaps most vociferously by Richard Dawkins.